Midnight, After Lecture
Featured in Manhattan January 2023
The remarkable Margin Alexander selected this piece to be in his collaborative concert, composing an original piece on piano to this painting.
Artwork features a Russian fur hat (ushanka), soviet-era tea glass and holder (podstakannik), Russian shawl, novels. Inspired by the artist’s time in university, studying Soviet-era literature.
Often in winter, I walked home from the university's engineering building long after midnight, scarf and ushanka a temporary respite against snowfall. At home, the single, dim yellow bulb cast nothing but shadows as I sat in silence for a while staring at the stacks of opened, annotated books and scattered notes on the table, on the floor, on the cushion next to me. Every day of that term, and still many years on, while the once-urgent equations fade from panicked memory, it is the fragments from authors armed only with ink and paper - who were destroyed for that ink on paper - that ring unceasingly in my mind. It is the courage of those authors that stirred my quiet contemplation into action and changed the course of my life.